If you’re flying between Costa Rica and the United States today, your flight should run close to schedule. The nationwide US ground stop that froze departures on Friday afternoon ended after about four hours, and airports in Costa Rica reported operations returning to normal on Saturday.
Check your flight in your airline’s app before you leave for the airport anyway. Aeris, which runs Juan SantamarÃa International Airport outside San José, has asked passengers to confirm their flight status directly with their airline, since itineraries can still change. Friday’s disruption hit both of the country’s main airports. At Juan SantamarÃa, Aeris said 12 departures and 11 arrivals were affected, and six departures and four arrivals were canceled. The rest were moved to overnight and early Saturday slots.
In Liberia, Guanacaste Airport representative Renata González said seven flights were canceled and that operations returned to normal over the course of Saturday. The outage was not an attack. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said it began during maintenance work to replace old copper wiring with fiber-optic cable, which disrupted communication with planes and radar feeds. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no evidence of hostile action.
Duffy said more than 9,000 US flights were canceled and nearly 25,000 were delayed. It was the longest nationwide ground stop in the United States in 25 years. On Sunday, President Donald Trump made his first public comments on the ground stop and blamed his predecessor. In posts on Truth Social, he called the Biden administration “an FAA disaster” and said “everything they touched turned bad.”
Trump said his administration has a plan for the flight control systems and urged Congress to approve the money quickly, saying much of the current air traffic control system is 50 years old. Efforts to modernize the FAA’s systems have spanned several administrations of both parties.
If your flight was canceled Friday and you have not rebooked, start with your airline’s website or app rather than the airport counter. If you decided not to travel at all, US rules entitle you to a refund for a canceled flight, even when the cause was out of the airline’s control. Whether a policy would have covered you is a separate question, covered in our guide to travel insurance after the ground stop.
Many US airlines fly a plane into Costa Rica and send the same jet straight back, so delays at a US hub can still ripple into a departure here, as Friday’s cancellations showed. Air traffic between the two countries has largely recovered, but the episode has renewed debate in Washington over how quickly, and at what cost, the US air traffic control system should be replaced.
